2001
Local elections in Croatia for officials in 21 county and 422 municipal
councils, as well as 123 city halls. 3.9 million Croats are eligible to
vote.2001 Presidential elections in Mongolia. President
Natsagiin Bagabandi is reelected. His Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party
runs the country almost as a one-party state. It has 72 of parliament's
76 seats, won in elections in 2000. Formerly Communist, it now claims to
be for democracy and radical economic reform.

2000
The five nuclear powers on the UN Security Council agree to eventually eliminate
their nuclear arsenals, as part of a new disarmament agenda approved by
187 countries.

^1996 US Supreme Court defends
equal rights of homosexuals
In a historic victory for the "gay" and lesbian civil rights movement,
the US Supreme Court voted six to three to strike down an amendment to Colorado’s
state constitution that would have prevented any city, town, or county from
taking any legislative, executive, or judicial action to protect the rights
of homosexuals. In 1992, Colorado’s Amendment 2 was passed with a majority
of the state’s citizens approving it in a special referendum. Four years
later, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Romer v. Evans, a case
that allowed the nation’s highest court to scrutinize the constitutionality
of the amendment. On 20 May 1996, in a ruling authored by Associate Justice
Anthony M. Kennedy, the Supreme Court strikes down Amendment 2, arguing
that the law inherently violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment by defining a specific group of person and then denying them the
possibility of protection across the board. Although the ruling, authored
by a Republican appointee, is cautious in its language, it is applauded
as a historic civil rights victory that gives activists of the homosexual
and lesbian civil rights movement their first major constitutional precedent
for fighting future anti-homosexual legislation.

1992 Illegitimacy is something we should talk
about in terms of not having it. says Vice President Dan Quayle (reported
in Esquire Aug.92)1991 Lawmakers in the
Soviet Union voted to liberalize foreign travel and emigration.

^1989 Martial Law in Beijing
China’s Communist government declares
martial law over Beijing and calls in troops and tanks to suppress
the dissidents protesting for democratic reforms in Beijing’s Tiananmen
Square. On April 15, the death
of Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party head who supported democratic
reforms, roused some 100'000 students to gather at Beijing's Tiananmen
Square to commemorate Hu and voice their discontent with China's authoritative
Communist government. On April
22, an official memorial service for Hu Yaobang was held in Tiananmen's
Great Hall of the People, and student representatives carried a petition
to the steps of the Great Hall, demanding to meet with Premier Li
Peng. The Chinese government refused such a meeting, leading to a
general boycott of Chinese universities across the country and widespread
calls for democratic reforms.
Ignoring government warnings of violent suppression of any mass demonstration,
students from more than forty universities began a march to Tiananmen
on April 27. The students were joined by workers, intellectuals, and
civil servants, and by mid-May over a million people filled the square,
the site of Communist leader's Mao Zedong's proclamation of the People's
Republic of China in 1949. On
May 20, the government formally declares martial law in Beijing, and
troops and tanks are called in to disperse the dissidents. However,
large numbers of students and citizens blocked the army's advance,
and by May 23, government forces had pulled back to the outskirts
of Beijing. On June 3, with negotiations to end the protests stalled
and calls for democratic reforms escalating, the troops received orders
from the Chinese government to reclaim Tiananmen at all cost. By the
end of the next day, Chinese troops had forcibly cleared Tiananmen
Square and Beijing's streets, killing hundreds of demonstrators and
arresting thousands of protestors and other suspected dissidents.
In the weeks after the government crackdown,
an unknown number of dissidents were executed and hard-liners in the
government took firm control of the country. The international community
was outraged by the incident, and economic sanctions imposed by the
United States and other countries sent China's economy into decline.
However, by late 1990, international trade had resumed, thanks in
part to China's release of several hundred imprisoned dissidents.

1989 Walter McConnel, 57, is oldest to reach 8300 m Mt
Everest top. 1985 Dow Jones industrial avg closes
above 1300 for first time. 1985 US began broadcasts
to Cuba on Radio Marti 1980 In a referendum, 59.5%
of Québec voters reject separatism. 1978
US launches Pioneer Venus 1; produces first global radar map of Venus 1972 Republic of Cameroon declared as constitution is
ratified.1970 Some 100'000 demonstrate in New York's
Wall Street district in support of US policy in Vietnam and Cambodia.

^1969 Bloody battle for
Hamburger Hill ends
After ten days and ten bloody assaults, Apbia Mountain (Hill 937), known
as "Hamburger Hill" by the Americans who fought there, is finally captured
by US and South Vietnamese troops.
Located 1.5 km east of the Laotian border, Hill 937 was to be taken as part
of Operation Apache Snow, a mission intended to limit enemy infiltration
from Laos that threatened Hue to the northeast and Danang to the southeast.
On May 10, following air and artillery strikes, a US-led infantry force
launched its first assault on the North Vietnamese stronghold, but suffered
a high proportion of casualties and fell back.
Ten more infantry assaults came over the next ten days, and Hill 937’s North
Vietnamese defenders did not give up their fortified position until May
20. Almost one hundred Americans had been killed and more than 400 had been
wounded, amounting to a shocking 70-percent casualty rate during the ten-day
battle. The same day that Hamburger
Hill was finally captured, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts called
the operation "senseless and irresponsible" and attacked the military tactics
of President Richard Nixon’s administration. His speech before the Senate
was seen as part of a growing public outcry over the US military policy
in Vietnam. In the next week, US military
command reversed their stance on the strategic importance of Hamburger Hill,
and, on May 28 it was abandoned, just one week after it was taken. North
Vietnamese forces eventually returned and re-fortified their original position.Criticism in the US Senate. As
part of a growing outcry over US military policy in Vietnam, Edward Kennedy
(D-Massachusetts), in a Senate speech, scorns the military tactics of the
Nixon administration. He condemned the battle for Ap Bia Mountain, which
had become known as "Hamburger Hill," as "senseless and irresponsible."
The battle in question had occurred as part of Operation Apache Snow in
the A Shau Valley. Starting on May 10, paratroopers from the 101st Airborne
had engaged a North Vietnamese regiment on the slopes of Hill 937, known
to the Vietnamese as Ap Bia Mountain. Entrenched in prepared fighting positions,
the North Vietnamese 29th Regiment repulsed the initial American assault,
and beat back another attempt by the 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry on May
14. An intense battle raged for the next 10 days as the mountain came under
heavy Allied air strikes, artillery barrages, and 10 infantry assaults.
On May 20, Maj. Gen. Melvin Zais, commanding general of the 101st, sent
in two additional US airborne battalions and a South Vietnamese battalion
as reinforcements. The Communist stronghold was finally captured in the
11th attack when the American and South Vietnamese soldiers fought their
way to the summit of the mountain. In the face of the four-battalion attack,
the North Vietnamese retreated to sanctuary areas in Laos.
During the intense fighting, 597 North Vietnamese were reported killed and
US casualties were 56 killed and 420 wounded. Due to the bitter fighting
and the high loss of life, the battle for Ap Bia Mountain received widespread
unfavorable publicity in the United States and was dubbed "Hamburger Hill"
in the US media, a name evidently derived from the fact that the battle
turned into a "meat grinder." Since the operation was not intended to hold
territory but rather to keep the North Vietnamese off balance, the mountain
was abandoned soon after the battle and was occupied by the North Vietnamese
a month later. Senator Kennedy was not the only American who thought the
battle had been futile and ill advised; there was widespread public outrage
over what appeared to be a senseless loss of American lives. The situation
was exacerbated by pictures published in Life magazine of 241 US soldiers
killed during the week of the Hamburger Hill battle. Gen. Creighton Abrams,
commander of US Military Assistance Command Vietnam, was ordered by the
White House to avoid such battles. Because of Hamburger Hill, and other
battles like it, US emphasis was placed on "Vietnamization" (turning the
war over to the South Vietnamese forces), rather than direct combat operations.

1961 White mob attacks a busload of "Freedom Riders"
in Montgomery, Alabama, prompting the federal government to send in US marshals
to restore order.

^1956 US tests thermonuclear
bomb over Bikini Atoll
The United States conducts the first airborne test of an improved
atomic fusion bomb, dropping it from a plane over the tiny island
of Namu in the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. The successful test
indicated that hydrogen bombs were viable airborne weapons and that
the arms race had taken another giant leap forward. The United States
first detonated a hydrogen bomb in 1952 in the Marshall Islands, also
in the Pacific. However, that bomb  and the others used in tests
that followed  were large and unwieldy affairs that were exploded
from the ground. The practical application of dropping the weapon
over an enemy had been a mere theoretical possibility until the successful
test in May 1956. The hydrogen bomb dropped over Bikini Atoll was
carried by a B-52 bomber and released at an altitude of more than
50'000 feet. The device exploded at about 5000 meter altitude. This
bomb was far more powerful than those previously tested and was estimated
to be 15 megatons or larger (one megaton is roughly equivalent to
1 million tons of TNT). Observers said that the fireball caused by
the explosion measured at least four miles in diameter and was brighter
than the light from 500 suns. The successful US test meant that the
ante in the nuclear arms race had been dramatically upped. The Soviets
had tested their own hydrogen bomb in 1953, shortly after the first
US test in 1952. In November 1955, the Soviets had dropped a hydrogen
bomb from an airplane in remote Siberia. Though much smaller and far
less powerful (estimated at about 1.6 megatons) than the US bomb dropped
over Bikini, the Russian success spurred the Americans to rush ahead
with the Bikini test. The massive open-air blast in 1956 caused concerns
among scientists and environmentalists about the effects of such testing
on human and animal life. During the coming years, a growing movement
in the United States and elsewhere began to push for a ban on open-air
atomic testing. The Limited Test Ban Treaty, signed in 1963 by the
United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, prohibited open-air
and underwater nuclear testing.

^1953 French see “light
at the end of the tunnel” in Vietnam
Using a phrase that will haunt Americans in later years  "Now
we can see [success in Vietnam] clearly, like light at the end of
a tunnel"  Gen. Henri Navarre assumes command of French Union
Forces in Vietnam. The French had been fighting a bloody war against
Communist insurgents in Vietnam since 1946. The insurgents, the Viet
Minh, were fighting for independence and the French were trying to
reassert their colonial rule in Indochina. Upon assumption of command,
Navarre addressed himself to the grave deterioration of the French
military position, particularly in the North, by advancing a plan
for a build up of French forces preparatory to a massive attack against
the Viet Minh. He received more support from US Secretary of State
John F. Dulles in Washington than he did from Paris, but his operations
during the summer only underscored the inadequacy of French military
means and French inability to deal with Viet Minh tactics. Ultimately,
the French were decisively defeated by the Viet Minh at Dien Bien
Phu in May 1954. When the US
took over the role of stopping Communism in South Vietnam, they ran
into the same kind of military problems that had plagued the French.
Nevertheless, there was a widespread feeling that the United States
would not make the same mistakes that the French had. In late 1967,
Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of US Military Assistance Command
Vietnam, used similar language to Navarre's when he asserted that
the US "had turned the corner in the war." His credibility was seriously
damaged on 29 January 1968, when the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese
launched a massive attack that became known as the Tet Offensive.
Conditioned by Westmoreland's overly optimistic assessments of the
war's progress, many Americans were stunned that the Communists could
launch such a ferocious attack. In the end, the Communists were defeated
on the battlefield, but achieved a great psychological victory that
caused many in America to question the wisdom of continuing US involvement
in the war.

^
1946 W.H. Auden becomes a US citizen
The English poet was born in 1907 in
England, had his first poem published in a collection called Public
School Verse when he was 17. He entered Oxford the following
year and befriended several men who became important intellectuals,
including Cecil Day-Lewis and Christopher Asherwood. His friend Stephen
Spender published Auden's first poetry collection in 1928, the year
Auden graduated from Oxford.
Two years later, Auden's second book, Poems, was published.
Auden spent a year in Berlin, then worked for five years as a teacher
in Scotland and England. He later worked for a government film bureau.
In the 1930s, Auden's work was highly political. He embraced leftist
causes and went to Spain intending to drive an ambulance during the
Spanish Civil War. However, he was so appalled by the sacking of Roman
Catholic churches that he returned to England.
In 1935, he married Thomas Mann's daughter Erika, whom he had never
met, to help her escape Nazi Germany. In 1936, he published On
This Island. In 1939, Auden moved to the US, and his work became
less political as he turned to Christianity. During this time, he
wrote such major works as Another Time (1940) and The
Double Man (1941). In 1948, Auden won the Pulitzer Prize for
his long poem The Age of Anxiety (1947), which explores human
isolation and spiritual emptiness in the modern city. In 1956, he
accepted a position as professor of poetry at Oxford, back in England.
He stayed at Oxford until 1960 and died in Austria in 1973.

1941 Germany invades Crete

A Moncornet et Crépy-sur-Serre,
le colonel de Gaulle et la 4ème DC ont arrêté depuis le 17
la progression allemande; mais il ne peuvent plus tenir un jour de
plus.^ 1940 Panzers at Abbeville The
German army in northern France reaches the English Channel. In reaching
Abbeville, German armored columns, led by General Heinz Guderian (a
tank expert), severed all communication between the British Expeditionary
Force (BEF) in the north and the main French army in the south. He
also cut off the Force from its supplies in the west. The Germans
now faced the sea, England in sight.
Winston Churchill was prepared for such a pass, having already made
plans for the withdrawal of the BEF (the BEF was a home-based army
force that went to northern France at the start of both World Wars
in order to support the French armies) and having called on the British
Admiralty to prepare "a large number of vessels" to cross over to
France if necessary. With German tanks at the Channel, Churchill prepared
for a possible invasion of England itself, approving a plan to put
into place gun posts and barbed wire roadblocks to protect government
offices in Whitehall as well as the prime minister's dwelling, 10
Downing Street. The first German
panzers of General Guderian reach the Somme estuary at Abbeville.
Immediately their armored columns start a sweep north, toward the
seaports of Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkirk.
Boulogne falls on May 23. Calais holds out for three days, then fall,
while the panzers pour north toward Dunkirk.2. General
Lord Gort of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF)
A crucial decision was forced on the commander of the BEF. General
Lord Gort was a brave, stubborn, intellectually limited man. His French
colleagues described him condescendingly as a "jovial battalion commander";
yet his troops called him "The Tiger" -a tribute to his personal courage.
His mind was all too readily bogged down by detail; at an important
conference in November 1939, he had astounded his colleagues by choosing
as the first subject of a discussion whether a helmet, when not on
a soldier's head, should be slung over the left shoulder or the right.3. Could the BEF make it?The great question was: Could the BEF make it? At the time
of Gort's decision the Germans were much closer to Dunkirk than the
BEF were. But what made Gort's decision the right one-though of course
he could not know it-was the fact that the Germans chose, unwittingly,
to help him by making strategic mistakes.4. Hitler's
mistakeThe chief error was made by Hitler
himself. Despite the heroic defenses of Boulogne and Calais, Guderian's
panzers found themselves almost in sight of Dunkirk by 24 May.
They were halted by the Aa Canal, 10 meters wide, 20 km from Dunkirk,
the last tank obstacle in Guderian's way. By the morning of the 25 May,
pontoon bridges were spanning the canal. A few tanks were across,
roaring and throbbing as their crews waited for the rest of the panzer
division to form up. But the order to advance was held up-that day
and the next-by the intercession of Hitler.5. "A small
price to pay" for Paris
The Fuhrer felt that victory was certain if they took their time to
make sure of it-step by step. The tanks that had made this victory
possible should not now be expended where they were not needed; they
should be husbanded for bigger battles to come. After all, the rest
of France remained
to be conquered. The goal, in the end, was Paris,
not an unimpressive port city like Dunkirk. If gaining that goal meant
that some British soldiers would manage to escape across the Channel,
it was a small price to pay. And Goring's
air force could play an important part in minimizing the number of
soldiers who escaped.  // http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/text/x18/xr1847.html6. Churchill was ready
Winston Churchill was prepared for the Germans reaching the English
Channel. Now General Heinz Guderian and his tanks had severed all
communication between the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in the
north and the main French army in the south, and also cut off the
Force from its supplies in the west. Churchill had already made plans
for the withdrawal of the BEF (the BEF was a home-based army force
that went to northern France at the start of both World Wars in order
to support the French armies) and had called on the British Admiralty
to prepare "a large number of vessels" to cross over to France if
necessary. Churchill also prepared for a possible invasion of England
itself, approving a plan to put into place gun posts and barbed wire
roadblocks to protect government offices in Whitehall as well as the
prime minister's dwelling, 10 Downing Street.

1939 Regular transatlantic passenger and air mail service
begins as a Pan American Airways plane, the Yankee Clipper, took off from
Port Washington, N.Y., bound for Marseille France.1932
Amelia Earhart took off from Newfoundland for Ireland to become the first
woman to fly solo across the Atlantic.

^1927
Spirit of St. Louis departs
At 07:52, American aviator Charles
Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., 25, takes off from Roosevelt Field on Long
Island, New York, on the world’s first solo, nonstop flight across
the Atlantic Ocean.
Lindbergh, a young airmail pilot, was a dark horse when he entered
a competition with a $25'000 payoff to fly nonstop from New York to
Paris. He ordered a small monoplane, configured it to his own design,
and christened it the Spirit of St. Louis.
On this rainy morning, he takes off from Roosevelt Field, but his
monoplane is so loaded down with fuel that it barely clears the trees
at the end of the runway. He flies north and then westward from Newfoundland,
Canada. The next afternoon, after flying 5810 km in thirty-three-and-a-half
hours, Lindbergh would land at Le Bourget field in Paris, becoming
the first pilot to accomplish the nonstop transatlantic crossing.
Lindbergh’s achievement made him an international celebrity, and won
widespread public acceptance of the airplane and commercial aviation.

^1862 The Homestead
Act In an important
milestone in the settlement of the American West, President Abraham
Lincoln signs into law the Homestead
Act, a program designed to grant public land to small farmers
at low cost. The act gives 160 acres of land (1/4 of a square mile,
or hectares) to any applicant who is a head of a household and twenty-one
years or older, provided that the person settles on the land for five
years and then pays a small filing fee. If settlers wished to obtain
title earlier, they could do so after six months by paying $1.25 an
acre. The Homestead
Act was first proposed in the 1850s, but, concerned free land
would lower property values and reduce the cheap labor supply, Northern
businessmen opposed the movement. Southern congressmen feared that
the settlement of the West by small farmers would the creation of
additional free states that would provide an agricultural alternative
to the Southern slave system. In 1858, a homestead bill was defeated
by only one vote in the Senate and in the next year a bill was passed
in both houses but vetoed by President James Buchanan. Passage of
the bill was high on President
Lincoln’s agenda, and the loss of Southern congressmen in the
succession removed most of the bill’s congressional opposition.
The president signs the Homestead Act
into law on May 20, 1862, and, by the end of the Civil War, some 15'000
land claims had been made. Most homesteaders were experienced farmers
from the crowded East or Europe, and by 1900, 600'000 claims had been
made for some 80 million acres of public land. Although, numerous
claims continued to be made into the twentieth century, the mechanization
of American agriculture in the 1930s and 1940s led to the replacement
of individual homesteads with a smaller number of much larger farms.
The Union Congress passes the Homestead
Act, allowing an adult over the age of 21, male or female, to claim
160 acres of land from the public domain. Eligible persons had to
cultivate the land and improve it by building a barn or house, and
live on the claim for five years, at which time the land became theirs
with a $10 filing fee. The government of the United States had long
wrestled with the problem of how to get land into the hands of productive
farmers. Throughout the 19th century, politicians had pursued a variety
of schemes to raise revenues from land sales, but the results were
always mixed. By the 1830s, Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton proposed
a program that would allow citizens to claim land from the public
domain to develop farmland. By the mid-19th century the issue of land
became embroiled in sectional politics. In the 1850s, the fledgling
Republican Party endorsed a homestead act as a way to develop an alliance
between the Northeast and Midwest. But the South wanted no part of
such a scheme. The expansion of slavery had become too important to
the South, and they felt expansion to the west was the only way to
keep the institution healthy. Filling the West with small individual
farmers did not sit well with Southerners. Consequently, it was impossible
to agree upon a proposal while the struggle over slavery continued.
The Republicans were strong enough by 1859 to push an act through
Congress, but Democratic president James Buchanan vetoed the measure.
However, the events of the war soon removed all obstacles to the bill.
The secession of Southern states opened the way for passage of the
Homestead Act of 1862. The Homestead Act was important symbolically
if not in practice. By 1890, only about three percent of the lands
west of the Mississippi had been given away under the act. This measure
was far less effective in making vacant land productive than were
liberal mining laws and grants to railroads. Nevertheless, it stands
as a shining example of legislation that passed in the North while
the South had seceded from the Union.

^
1498 Vasco da Gama reaches India
Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama becomes
the first European to reach India via the Atlantic Ocean or Mediterranean
Sea when he arrives at Calicut on the Malabar Coast. Da Gama sailed
from Lisbon, Portugal, in July 1497, rounded the Cape of Good Hope,
and anchored at Malindi on the east coast of Africa. With the aid
of an Indian merchant he met there, he then set off across the Indian
Ocean. The Portuguese explorer was not greeted warmly by the Muslim
merchants of Calicut, and in 1499 he had to fight his way out of the
harbor on his return trip home. In 1502, he led a squadron of ships
to Calicut to avenge the massacre of Portuguese explorers there and
succeeded in subduing the inhabitants. In 1524, he was sent as viceroy
to India, but he fell ill and died in Cochin.

2005 A woman and Zagir Arukhov, Dagestan's minister for
ethnic policy, by an explosion in an apartment building in Makhachkala,
Dagestan, Russia.

2004:: 41 persons massacred
in a refugee camp near Gulu Uganda, by by rebels belonging to the Lord's
Resistance Army (LRA), who also burn hundreds of huts, making thousands
of people homeless. The LRA is a so-called Christian group with no clear
objectives except to discredit President Yoweri Museveni. It has abducted
thousands of children since 1997 and forced them to serve as fighters, porters,
and sex slaves in camps in Sudan. Some 1.5 million people have fled the
fighting between government troops and the rebels. Many now live in 60 squalid
camps, set up in the remote north of the country. In February, the LRA rebels
had shot, clubbed and burned to death 200 people during an attack at a camp
near the town of Lira. LRA, led by self-proclaimed prophet Joseph Kony,
has become notorious for its brutality, often slicing off the lips and ears
of its victims. Kony and some of his associates are being investigated by
the International Criminal Court for war crimes.2004 Palestinian boy, 13, shot by Israeli troops during
demonstrations in the Fawar refugee camp, near Hebron, West Bank, against
the continuing deadly attack of Israel against the Rafah refugee camp in
the Gaza Strip.2004 Mazen Yassin, local head of Hamas, in Qalqilyah, West
Bank, shot by Israeli troops when he did not obey their order to stop. He
was armed but made no attempt to shoot.

2004 Three Palestinian
fighters, by an Israel Air Force helicopter missile, in the early
hours, as Israelis extend to the Brazil neighborhood their attack on the
Rafah refugee camp, Gaza Strip, which they began on 18 May in the Tel Sultan
neighborhood.

2003 Linda Chioino of Italy, born
on 26 February 1892.

2002 Stephen Jay Gould[1999 photo >], 60, of adenocarcinoma of the lung, evolutionary
biologist born on 10 September 1941. One of his controversial theories
was that evolution occurs jerkily. Author of such books as Ontogeny
and Phylogeny, Ever Since Darwin, The Panda's Thumb, The Mismeasure of Man
(on intelligence testing), Bully for Brontosaurus, Dinosaur in a Haystack,
Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, The Structure
of Evolutionary Theory (March 2002, 1464 pages).

2002
Jihad Jibril[< photo], 38, lieutenant colonel
in the terrorist Syrian-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General
Command, and son of its general secretary Ahmed Jibril, who founded it in
1968. Jihad Jibril was driving his Peugeot sedan down a street off the busy
Corniche Mazraa in west Beirut when a bomb under his seat detonated at midday.
Israel denies involvement.
2001:: 26 of the 32 prisoners in a prison dorm in Iquique, Chile,
in fire started by prisoners in mattresses and blankets. Most of the 32
were young, first-time offenders.

^
1998 William
P. Kinkel, 59,
Faith M. Kinkel, 57
shot dead by their son, Kipland
P. Kinkel, 15, in Springfield, Oregon. He first shoots his father
in the back of the head at about 17:00. When his mom comes home at
about 18:00, he says: "I love you mom, and shoots her dead..
He writes a note:"I
have just killed my parents! I don't know what is happening. I love
my mom and dad so much. I just got two felonies on my record. My parents
can't take that! It would destroy them. The embarrassment would be
too much for them. They couldn't live with themselves. I'm so sorry.
I am a horrible son. I wish I had been aborted. I destroy everything
I touch. I can't eat. I can't sleep. I didn't deserve them. They were
wonderful people. It's not their fault or the fault of any person,
organization, or television show. My head just doesn't work right.
God damn these VOICES inside my head. I want to die. I want to be
gone. But I have to kill people. I don't know why. I am so sorry!
Why did God do this to me. I have never been happy. I wish I was happy.
I wish I made my mother proud. I am nothing! I tried so hard to find
happiness. But you know me I hate everything. I have no other choice.
What have I become? I am so sorry"
The next morning he would go to Thurston High School and shoot 48
shots from a semi-automatic rifle, killing Mikael Nickkolauson, and
wounding more than 20 other people, one of which, Ben Walker, 16,
died the next day from his injuries..  MORE

1997 Ezequiel Hernandez, 18, shot in the side, without
a warning, by Cpl. Banuelos, 22, of a squad of 4 camouflaged Marines on
drug surveillance duty near Mexican border in Redford, Texas, while Ezequiel
was herding his goats. Ezequiel had a .22-caliber rifle which he did NOT
fire at the Marines. They followed him for 20 minutes before killing him,
and then let him bleed to death, calling for medical help only after 22
minutes, and attempting no first-aid. On 14 August 1997, a grand jury would
refuse to indict the killer, who claimed he was acting in self-defense.1975 Barbara
Hepworth, British abstract sculptor and draftswoman born on
10 January 1903. — link
to images.1965 Charles Camoin, French Fauvist
painter born on 23 September 1879. —MORE
ON CAMOIN AT ART 4 MAYwith
links to images.1956 Sir Henry Maximilian Beerbohm,
English caricaturist, writer, dandy, and wit, born on 24 August 1872. —MORE
ON BEERBOHM AT ART 4 MAYwith
links to images.

^1948 Syrian attackers
and Israeli defenders of Degania. The
Syrian invaders of the new state of Israel attack kibbutz Degania
A starting at dawn. The main objectives of the Syrian advance are
the Jordan river bridges north of Degania A. They shell the center
of the kibbutz with mortars and tank guns. An integrated Syrian force
comprised of tanks, armored cars, and infantry attacks the defense
positions at the outer perimeter of Degania A. They forced the defenders,
70 in number, out of their positions and into the communication trenches.
Some of the Syrian tanks and armored vehicles are able to advance
close to and eventually penetrate the kibbutz fence. But they are
stopped by 20 mm cannons, Piat antitank shells, and Molotov cocktails.
One Renault 35 tank which penetrates into the kibbutz was attacked
by Molotov cocktails and hand grenades . It would remain in the kibbutz
as a permanent monument. Syrian
infantry troops who approach the kibbutz perimeter are stopped by
the defenders. During the attack, Syrian artillery interdicts the
roads thus preventing reinforcements from arriving. The defenders'
positions are hit and the defenders suffered casualties. Yet despite
their losses and lack of appropriate weapons and ammunition, the defenders
are able to hold their positions and the Syrians retreat after several
of their armored vehicles are hit.
The battle for Degania A over, the Syrians now attacked kibbutz Degania
B. They shell the kibbutz with mortars as tanks and armored cars approached
the kibbutz. This time the tanks stop at a safe distance of 400 meters
from the fence and shell the defenders' positions. Syrian infantry
that attempts to approach the kibbutz are driven back. A second assault
by infantry and armored vehicles is also repelled. At this time new
Israeli field artillery pieces arrive . They are thrown into action
before their crews have time to train with them. However the artillery
barrages cause surprise and confusion among the Syrian troops who
began to withdraw. The battle ends with the Syrian retreat. Israeli
forces capture the village of Zemah, North-East of Degania.

1943 Henry
Seely White, on his 82nd birthday, US research mathematician.
He worked on invariant theory, the geometry of curves and surfaces, algebraic
curves and twisted curves. Here is a theorem proved by White in 1915:
If seven points on a twisted cubic be joined, two and two, by twenty-one
lines, then any seven planes that contain these 21 lines will osculate a
second cubic curve. In 1896 he
instigated the Colloquium Lectures of the American Mathematical Society.
He was a Colloquium Lecturer himself in 1903 when he lectured on Linear
systems of curves on algebraic surfaces. White was president of the American
Mathematical Society from 1907 to 1908.1886 Pierre-Édouard
Frère, French painter born on 10 January 1819.

^1834 Marie Jean
Paul Joseph Roche Yves Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette,
born on 06 September 1757. He fought on the side of the American colonists
against the British in the US War of Independence. Later, by allying
himself with the revolutionary bourgeoisie, he became one of the most
powerful men in France during the first few years of the French Revolution.
Born into an ancient noble family,
Lafayette had already inherited an immense fortune by the time he
married the daughter of the influential duc d'Ayen in 1774. He joined
the circle of young courtiers at the court of King Louis XVI but soon
aspired to win glory as a soldier. Hence, in July 1777, 27 months
after the outbreak of the US War of Independence, he arrived in Philadelphia.
Appointed a major general by the colonists, he quickly struck up a
lasting friendship with the American commander in chief, George Washington.
Lafayette fought with distinction at the Battle of Brandywine, Pennsylvania,
on 11 September 1777, and, as a division commander, he conducted a
masterly retreat from Barren Hill on 28 May 1778. Returning to France
early in 1779, he helped persuade the government of Louis XVI to send
a 6000-man expeditionary army to aid the colonists. Lafayette arrived
back in America in April 1780 and was immediately given command of
an army in Virginia. After forcing the British commander Lord Charles
Cornwallis [31 Dec 1738 – 05 Oct 1805] to retreat across Virginia,
Lafayette entrapped him at Yorktown in late July. A French fleet and
several additional American armies joined the siege, and on 19 October
178 Cornwallis surrendered. The British cause was lost. Lafayette
was hailed as “the Hero of Two Worlds,” and on returning
to France in 1782 he was promoted maréchal de camp (brigadier
general). He became a citizen of several states on a visit to the
United States in 1784. During the
next five years, Lafayette became a leader of the liberal aristocrats
and an outspoken advocate of religious toleration and the abolition
of the slave trade. Elected as a representative of the nobility to
the States General that convened in May 1789, Lafayette supported
the maneuvers by which the bourgeois deputies of the Third Estate
gained control of the States General and converted it into a revolutionary
National Assembly. On 11 July1789 he presented to the Assembly his
draft of a Déclaration des droits de l'Homme et du citoyen. After
extensive revisions the
document was adopted on 26 August 1789. Meanwhile on 15 July1789,
the day after a crowd stormed the Bastille, Lafayette had been elected
commander of the newly formed national guard of Paris. His troops
saved Louis XVI and Queen Marie-Antoinette from the fury of a crowd
that invaded Versailles on 06 October 1789, and he then carried the
royal family to Paris, where they became hostages of the Revolution.
For the next year, Lafayette's popularity
and influence were at their height. He supported measures that transferred
power from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie, but he feared that
further democratization would encourage the lower classes to attack
property rights. Hence, he became alarmed as republicans began to
assail the new system of constitutional monarchy. When a crowd of
petitioners gathered on the Champ de Mars in Paris (17 July 1791)
to demand the abdication of the King, Lafayette's guards opened fire,
killing or wounding about 50 demonstrators. The incident destroyed
his popularity, and in October he resigned from the guard.
Appointed commander of the army at Metz in December 1791, Lafayette
hoped to suppress the radical democrats (and perhaps rule in the King's
name) after France went to war with Austria in April 1792. His plans
failed, and on 10 August 1792, the monarchy was overthrown in a popular
insurrection. Lafayette would have been tried for treason had he not
defected (19 Aug 1792) to the Austrians, who held him captive until
1797. When Napoléon Bonaparte came to power in 1799, Lafayette
returned to France and settled down as a gentleman farmer.He sat in
the Chamber of Deputies during most of the reign of King Louis XVIII
(1814–1824), and in 1824–1825 he visited the United States,
where he was received with wild adulation. In July 1830 he commanded
the national guard that helped overthrow King Charles X and install
Louis-Philippe on the throne. Lafayette retired six months later.
 1825
portrait by Charles
Cromwell Ingham. — A Horse
at Yorktown glaring at slave James Armistead and ignoring General
Lafayette, 1783 painting by Jean-Baptiste-Louis Le Paon [1737
– 27 May 1785]

1824 Thomas Hickey, Irish portrait painter born in 1741,
who worked in Dublin, London, and India. — more
with links to images.1798 Erland
Samuel Bring,
Swedish mathematician born on 19 August 1736.

^1506 Christopher
Colombus, 55, explorer, without due recognition.
The great Italian explorer Christopher
Columbus dies in Valladolid, Spain. Columbus was the first European
to explore the Americas since the Vikings set up colonies in Greenland
and Newfoundland in the 10th century. He explored the West Indies,
South America, and Central America, but died a disappointed man, feeling
he had been mistreated by his patron, King Ferdinand of Spain.
Columbus was born in Genoa, Italy,
in 1451. Little is known of his early life, but he worked as a seaman
and then a sailing entrepreneur. He became obsessed with the possibility
of pioneering a western sea route to Cathay (China), India, and the
fabled gold and spice islands of Asia. At the time, Europeans knew
no direct sea route to southern Asia, and the route via Egypt and
the Red Sea was closed to Europeans by the Ottoman Empire, as were
many land routes. Contrary to popular legend, educated Europeans of
Columbus' day did believe that the world was round, as argued by St.
Isidore in the seventh century.
However, Columbus, and most others, underestimated the world's size,
calculating that East Asia must lie approximately where North America
sits on the globe (they did not yet know of that the Pacific Ocean
existed). With only the Atlantic Ocean, he thought, lying between
Europe and the riches of the East Indies, Columbus met with King John
II of Portugal and tried to persuade him to back his "Enterprise of
the Indies," as he called his plan. He was rebuffed and went to Spain,
where he was also rejected at least twice by King Ferdinand and Queen
Isabella. However, after the
Spanish conquest of the Moorish kingdom of Granada in January 1492,
the Spanish monarchs, flush with victory, agreed to support his voyage.
On August 3, 1492, Columbus set sail from Palos, Spain, with three
small ships, the Santa María, the Pinta, and the
Niña. On 12 October 1492, the expedition sighted land, probably
Watling Island in the Bahamas, and went ashore the same day, claiming
it for Spain. Later that month,
Columbus sighted Cuba, which he thought was mainland China, and in
December the expedition landed on Hispaniola, which Columbus thought
might be Japan. He established a small colony there with 39 of his
men. The explorer returned to
Spain with gold, spices, and "Indian" captives in March 1493, and
was received with the highest honors by the Spanish court. He was
given the title "admiral of the ocean sea," and a second expedition
was promptly organized. Fitted out with a large fleet of 17 ships,
with 1500 colonists aboard, Columbus set out from Cádiz in September
1493 on his second voyage to the New World. Landfall was made in the
Lesser Antilles in November. Returning to Hispaniola, he found the
men he left there slaughtered by the natives, and he founded a second
colony. Sailing on, he explored Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and numerous
smaller islands in the Caribbean.
Columbus returned to Spain in June 1496 and was greeted less warmly,
as the yield from the second voyage had fallen well short of its costs.
Isabella and Ferdinand, still greedy for the riches of the East, agreed
to a smaller third voyage and instructed Columbus to find a strait
to India. In May 1498, Columbus left Spain with six ships, three filled
with colonists and three with provisions for the colony on Hispaniola.
This time, he made landfall on Trinidad. He entered the Gulf of Paria
in Venezuela and planted the Spanish flag on South America. By the
scope of the Orinoco River in Venezuela, he realized he had stumbled
upon another continent, which Columbus, a deeply religious man, decided
after careful thought was the outer regions of the Garden of Eden.
Returning to Hispaniola, he found that
conditions on the island had deteriorated under the rule of his brothers,
Diego and Bartholomew. Columbus' efforts to restore order were marked
by brutality, and his rule came to be deeply resented by both the
colonists and the native Taino chiefs. In 1500, Spanish chief justice
Francisco de Bobadilla arrived at Hispaniola, sent by Isabella and
Ferdinand to investigate complaints, and Columbus and his brother
were sent back to Spain in chains. He was immediately released upon
his return, and Ferdinand and Isabella agreed to finance a fourth
voyage in which he was to search for the earthly paradise and the
realms of gold said to lie nearby. He was also to continue looking
for a passage to India. In May
1502, Columbus left Cádiz on his fourth and final voyage to the New
World. After returning to Hispaniola against his patron's wishes,
he explored the coast of Central America looking for a strait and
for gold. Attempting to return to Hispaniola, his ships, in poor condition,
had to be beached on Jamaica. Columbus and his men were marooned,
but two of his captains succeed in canoeing the 450 miles to Hispaniola.
Columbus was a castaway on Jamaica for a year before a rescue ship
arrived. In November 1504, Columbus returned to Spain. Queen Isabella,
his chief patron, died less than three weeks later.
Although Columbus enjoyed a substantial revenue from Hispaniola gold
during the last years of his life, he repeatedly attempted (unsuccessfully)
to gain an audience with King Ferdinand, whom he felt owed him further
redress. Columbus dies on 20 May 1506, without realizing the great
scope of his achievement: He had discovered for Europe the New World,
whose riches over the next century would help make Spain the wealthiest
and most powerful nation on earth.

1877 Desmond Charles Otto MacCarthy, English
journalist, best known as a drama and literary critic, who died on 08 June
1952. — <<< portrait by Duncan
Grant [21 Jan 1885 – 08
May 1978]

^1873 Copper-riveted
jeans are patented by Levi Strauss.
Acting at the behest of a Reno, Nevada, tailor who had invented the
idea, Levi Strauss secures the necessary patents for canvas pants
with copper rivets to reinforce the stress points. Born in Buttenheim,
Bavaria, in 1829, the young Levi Strauss emigrated to the United States
in 1847. Strauss initially went into business selling dry goods along
the East Coast, but in 1852, his brother-in-law encouraged him to
relocate to the booming city of San Francisco.
He arrived in San Francisco in 1853 with a load of merchandise that
he hoped to sell in the California mining camps. Unable to sell a
large supply of canvas, Strauss hit on the idea of using the durable
material to make work pants for miners. Strauss' canvas pants were
an immediate success among hardworking miners who had long complained
that conventional pants wore out too quickly.
In 1872, Strauss received a letter from Jacob Davis, a customer and
tailor who worked in the mining town of Reno, Nevada. Davis reported
that he had discovered canvas pants could be improved if the pocket
seams and other weak points that tended to tear were strengthened
by copper rivets. Davis' riveted
pants had proven popular in Reno, but he needed a patent to protect
his invention. Intrigued by the copper-riveted pants, Strauss and
his partners agreed to undertake the necessary legal work for the
patent and begin large-scale production of the pants. Davis' invention
was patented on this day in 1873. In exchange for his idea, Strauss
made the Reno tailor his production manager. Eventually, Strauss switched
from using canvas to heavyweight blue denim, and the modern "blue
jeans" were born. Since then, Levi Strauss & Company has sold more
than 200 million pairs of copper-riveted jeans. By the turn of the
century, people outside of the mining and ranching communities had
discovered that "Levi's" were both comfortable and durable. Eventually,
the jeans lost most of their association with the West and came to
be simply a standard element of the casual American wardrobe.

1861 Henry
White, mathematician (would die on this date in 1943)1857 Herman Gustaf Sillen, Swedish artist who died on 29
December 1908.1856 Henri-Edmond Delacroix Cross,
French Pointillist
painter who died on 16 May 1910.  MORE
ON “CROSS” AT ART 4 MAYwith links to images. 1851 Emile Berliner
Germany, inventor (flat phonograph record)1843 Emil Adam,
German painter, specialized in race horses, who died in 1924.
1822 Frédéric Passy co-winner of first Nobel Peace
Prize (1901)1818 William George Fargo, who would
help to found Wells, Fargo and Co.1815 Barthélémy Menn,
Swiss painter and teacher who died on 13 (11?) October 1893. —
more

^1806
John Stuart Mill, English philosopher, economist,
exponent of Utilitarianism, prominent as a publicist, he remains of
lasting interest as a logician and an ethical theorist. He died on
08 May 1873. He would be the leader
of the utilitarian movement,: editor: Westminster Review;
philosopher: (System of Logic, Principles of Political Economy, Utilitarianism,
On Liberty, The Subjection of Women) The
eldest son of the British historian, economist, and philosopher James
Mill [06 April 1773 – 23 Jun 1836], John Stuart Mill was born
in his father's house in Pentonville, London. He was educated exclusively
by his father, who was a strict disciplinarian. By his eighth year
he had read in the original Greek Aesop's Fables, Xenophon's
Anabasis, and the whole of the historian Herodotus. He was
acquainted with the satirist Lucian, the historian of philosophy Diogenes
Laërtius, the Athenian writer and educational theorist Isocrates,
and six dialogues of Plato. He had also read a great deal of history
in English. At the age of eight he started Latin, the geometry of
Euclid, and algebra andbegan to teach the younger children of the
family. His main reading was still history, but he went through all
the Latin and Greek authors commonly read in the schools and universities
and, by the age of 10 could read Plato and the Athenian statesman
Demosthenes with ease. About the age of 12, he began a thorough study
of Scholastic logic, at the same time reading Aristotle's logical
treatises in the original. In the following year he was introduced
to political economy and studied the work of the Scottish political
economist and philosopher Adam Smith and that of the English economist
David Ricardo. While the training
the younger Mill received has aroused amazement and criticism, its
most important aspect was the close association it fostered with the
strenuous character and vigorous intellect of his father. From his
earliest days he spent much time in his father's studyand habitually
accompanied him on his walks. He thus inevitably acquired many of
his father's speculative opinions and his father's way of defending
them. But he did not receive the impress passively and mechanically.
The duty of collecting and weighing evidence for himself was at every
turn impressed upon the boy. His childhood was not unhappy, but it
was a strain on his constitution and he suffered from the lack of
natural, unforced development.
From May 1820 until July 1821, Mill was in France with the family
of Sir Samuel Bentham, brother of Jeremy Bentham [15 Feb 1748 –
06 Jun 1832], the English Utilitarian philosopher, economist, and
theoretical jurist. Copious extracts from a diary kept at this time
show how methodically he read and wrote, studied chemistry and botany,
tackled advanced mathematical problems, and made notes on the scenery
and the people and customs of the country. He also gained a thorough
acquaintance with the French language. On his return in 1821 he added
to his work the study of psychology and of Roman law, which he read
with John Austin, his father having half decided on the bar as the
best profession open to him. This intention, however, was abandoned,
and in 1823, when he had just completed his 17th year, he entered
the examiner's office of the India House. After a short probation
he was promoted in 1828 to assistant examiner. For 20 years, from
1836 (when his father died) to 1856, Mill had charge of the British
East India Company's relations with the Indian states, and in 1856
he became chief of the examiner's office.
In 1822 Mill had read P.-E.-L. Dumont's exposition of Bentham's doctrines
in the Traités de Législation, which made a
lasting impression upon him. The impression was confirmed by the study
of the English psychologists and also of two 18th-century French philosophers,
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac [30 Sep 1705 – 02 Aug 1780],
who was also a psychologist, and Claude-Adrien Helvétius, who
was noted for his emphasis on physical sensations. Soon after, in
1822–1823, Mill established among a few friends the Utilitarian
Society, taking the word, as he tells us, from Annals of the Parish
, a novel of Scottish country life by John Galt.
Two newspapers welcomed his contributions, The Traveller,
edited by a friend of Bentham's, and The Morning Chronicle,
edited by his father's friend John Black. One of his first efforts
was a solid argument for freedom of discussion in a series of letters
to the Chronicle on the prosecution of Richard Carlile, a 19th-century
English radical and freethinker. Mill seized every chance for exposing
departures from sound principle in Parliament and courts of justice.
Another outlet was opened up for him (April 1824) with the founding
of the Westminster Review, which was the organ of the philosophical
radicals. In 1825 he began work on an edition of Bentham's Rationale
of Judicial Evidence (5 vol., 1827). He took part eagerly in
discussions with the many men of distinction who came to his father's
house and engaged in set discussions at a reading society formed at
the home of English historian George Grote in 1825 and in debates
at the London Debating Society, formed in the same year.
The Autobiography tells how in 1826 Mill's enthusiasm was
checked by a misgiving as to the value of the ends that he had set
before him. At the London Debating Society, where he first measured
his strength in public conflict, he found himself looked upon with
curiosity as a precocious phenomenon, a “made man,” an
intellectual machine set to grind certain tunes. The elder Mill, like
Plato, would have put poets under ban as enemies of truth; he subordinated
private to public affections; and Landor's maxims of “few acquaintances,
fewer friends, no familiarities” had his cordial approval. The
younger Mill now felt himself forced toabandon these doctrines. Too
much in awe of his father to make him a confidant, he wrestled with
his doubts in gloomy solitude. He emerged from the struggle with a
more catholic view ofhuman happiness, a delight in poetry for its
own sake, a more placable attitude in controversy, a hatred of sectarianism,
and an ambition no less noble and disinterested but moderated to practical
possibilities. Gradually, the debates in the Debating Society attracted
men with whom contact was invigorating and inspiring. Mill ceased
to attend the society in 1829, but he carried away from it the conviction
that a true system of political philosophy was something much more
complex and many-sided than he had previously had any idea of,and
that its office was to supply, not a set of model institutions but
principles from which the institutions suitable to any given circumstances
might be deduced. Mill's letters
in The Examiner in the autumn of 1830, after a visit to Paris,
where he made the acquaintance of the younger liberals, may be taken
as marking his return to hopeful activity; and a series of articles
on “The Spirit of the Age” appeared in the same paper
in 1831. During the years 1832 and 1833 he contributed many essays
to Tait's Magazine, The Jurist, and The Monthly Repository.
In 1835 Sir William Molesworth founded The London Review,
with Mill as editor. It was amalgamated with The Westminster
(as The London and Westminster Review) in1836, and Mill continued
as editor (latterly as proprietor, also) until 1840. In and after
1840 he published several important articles in The Edinburgh
Review. Some of the essays written for these journals were reprinted
in the first two volumes (1859) of Mill's Dissertations and Discussions
and give evidence of the increasing width of his interests. Among
the more important are “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties”
(1833), “Writings of Alfred de Vigny” (1838), “Bentham”
(1838), “Coleridge” (1840), “M. De Tocqueville on
Democracy in America”(1840), “Michelet's History of France”
(1844), and “Guizot's Essays and Lectures on History”
(1845). The twin essays on Bentham and Coleridge show Mill's powers
at their splendid best and indicate very clearly the new spirit that
he tried to breathe into English radicalism.
During these years Mill also wrote his great systematic works on logic
and on political economy. His reawakened enthusiasm for humanity had
taken shape as an aspiration to supply an unimpeachable method of
proof for conclusions in moral and social science; the French positivist
philosopher Auguste Comte had some influence here, but the main inspiration
undoubtedly came from the English scientist and mathematician Sir
Isaac Newton,whose physics had already been accepted as a model of
scientific exposition by such earlier British philosophers as John
Locke, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, and James Mill. But he was determined
that the new logic should not simply oppose the old logic. In his
Westminster review (of 1828) of Elements of Logic
of Richard Whately [01 Feb 1787 – 08 Oct 1863], he was already
defending the syllogism against the Scottish philosophers who had
talked of superseding it by a supposed system of inductive logic.
He required his inductive logic to “supplement and not supersede.”
For several years he searched in vain for the means of concatenation.
Finally, in 1837, on reading Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences
of William Whewell [24 May 1794
– 06 Mar 1866] and rereading Preliminary Discourse on the
Study of Natural Philosophy of John F.W. Herschel, Mill at last
saw his way clear both to formulating the methods of scientific investigation
and to joining the new logic onto the old as a supplement. A System
of Logic, in two volumes, was published in 1843 (3rd–8th
editions, introducing many changes, 1851–1872). Book VI is his
valiant attempt to formulate a logic of the human sciences, including
history, psychology, and sociology, based on causal explanation conceived
in Humean terms, a formulation that has lately come in for radical
criticism. Mill distinguished three
stages in his development as a political economist. In 1844 he published
the Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy,
which he had written several years earlier, and four out of five of
these essays are solutions of perplexing technical problems—the
distribution of the gains of international commerce, the influence
of consumption on production, the definition of productive and unproductive
labour, and the precise relations between profits and wages. Here
for the most part Mill appears as the disciple of David Ricardo, striving
after more precise statements and reaching forward to further consequences.
In his second stage, originality and independence become more conspicuous
as he struggles toward the standpoint from which he wrote his Principles
of Political Economy . This was published in 1848 (2 vol.; 2nd
and 3rd eds., with significant differences, 1849, 1852), and, at about
the same time, Mill was advocating the creation of peasant proprietorships
as a remedy for the distresses and disorder in Ireland. Thereafter,
he made a more thorough study of Socialist writers. He was convinced
that the social question was as important as the political question.
He declined to accept property, devised originally to secure peace
in a primitive society, as necessarily sacred in its existing developments
in a quite different stage of society. He separated questions of production
and distribution and could not rest satisfied with the distribution
that condemned the labouring classes to a cramped and wretched existence,
in many cases to starvation. He did not come to a Socialist solution,
but he had the great merit of having considered afresh the foundations
of society. This he called his third stage as a political economist,
and he says that he was helped toward it by Mrs. Taylor (Harriet Hardy),
who became his wife in 1851. It
is generally supposed that Mill writes with a lover's extravagance
about Harriet's powers. He expressly says, indeed, that he owed none
of his technical doctrine to her, that she influenced only his ideals
of life for the individual and for society, and that the only work
directly inspired by her is the essay on the “Enfranchisement
of Women” (Dissertations, vol. 2). Nevertheless, Mill's
relations with her have always been something of a puzzle.
During the seven years of his marriage Mill became increasingly absorbed
in the work of the British East India Company and in consequence published
less than at any other period of his life. In 1856 he became head
of the examiner's office in the India House, and for two years, tillthe
dissolution of the company in 1858, his official work kept him fully
occupied. It fell to him as head of the office to write the defense
of the company's government of India when the transfer of its powers
was proposed. Mill opposed the transfer, and the documents in which
he defended the company's administration are models of trenchant and
dignified pleading. On the dissolution of the company, Mill was offered
a seat in the new council but declined it and retired with a pension
of £1500. His retirement from official life was followed almost
immediately by his wife's death at Avignon, France. He spent most
of the rest of his life at a villa at Saint-Véran, near Avignon,
returning to his house at Blackheath only for a short period in each
year. Mill sought relief by publishing
a series of books on ethics and politics that he had meditated upon
and partly written in collaboration with his wife. The essay On
Liberty appeared in 1859 with a touching dedication to her and
the Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform in the same year. In
his Considerations on Representative Government (1861) he
systematized opinions already put forward in many casual articles
and essays. It has been remarked how Mill combined enthusiasm for
democratic government with pessimism as to what democracy was likely
to do; practically every discussion in these books exemplifies this.
His Utilitarianism (in Fraser's Magazine, 1861;
separate publication, 1863) was a closely reasoned attempt to answer
objections to his ethical theory and to remove misconceptions about
it. He was especially anxious to make it clear that he included in
“utility” the pleasures of the imagination and the gratification
of the higher emotions; and to make a place in his system for settled
rules of conduct. Mill also began
to write again on the wider philosophical questions that had occupied
him in the Logic. In 1865 he published both his Examination of
Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy and his Auguste Comte and
Positivism, but in both writings his motives were largely political.
It was because he regarded the writings and sayings of Sir William
Hamilton as the great fortress of intuitional philosophy in Great
Britain that Mill undertook to counter his pretensions. In dealing
with Comte, Mill distinguished sharply between Comte's earlier philosophical
doctrine of Positivism and his later religion of humanity. The doctrine
he commended (as he had frequently done previously) because he regarded
it as a natural development of the outlook of George Berkeley and
Hume; the religion he attacked because he saw in it merely another
attempt to foist a priestly hierarchy upon suffering humanity. It
is noticeable that Mill's language in these books is much closer to
the language of Bentham and James Mill than it had been since his
boyhood, and it was as an act of piety that in 1869 he republished
his father's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind
with additional illustrations and explanatory notes.
While engaged in these years mainly with theoretical studies, Mill
did not remit his interest in current politics. He supported the North
in the US Civil War, using all his strength to explain that the real
issue at stake in the struggle was the abolition of slavery. In 1865
he stood as parliamentary candidate for Westminster, on conditions
strictly in accordance with his principles. He would not canvass or
pay agents to canvass for him, nor would he engage to attend to the
local business of the constituency. He was with difficulty persuaded
even to address a meeting of the electors but was elected. He took
an active part in the debates preceding the passage of the 1867 Reform
Bill, and helped to extort from the government several useful modifications
of the bill, for the prevention of corrupt practices. The reform of
land tenure in Ireland (see his England and Ireland, 1868,
and his Chapters and Speeches on the Irish Land Question,
1870), the representation of women (see below), the reduction of the
national debt, the reform of London government, and the abrogation
of the Declaration of Paris (1856), concerning the carriage of property
at sea during the Crimean War—were among the topics on which
he spoke. He took occasion more than once to enforce what he hadoften
advocated, England's duty to intervene in foreign politics in support
of freedom. As a speaker Mill was somewhat hesitating, but he showed
great readiness in extemporaneous debate. Elected rector of St. Andrews
University, he published his “Inaugural Address” in 1867.
Mill's subscription to the election
expenses of the freethinker and radical politician Charles Bradlaugh
and his attack on the conduct of Gov. E.J. Eyre in Jamaica were perhaps
the main causes of his defeat in the general parliamentary election
of 1868. But his studied advocacy of unfamiliar projects of reform
had made him unpopular with “moderate Liberals.” He retired
with a sense of relief to Avignon. His villa was filled with books
and newspapers; the country round it furnished him with a variety
of walks; he read, wrote, discussed, walked, botanized. He was extremely
fond of music and was himself a fair pianist. His stepdaughter, Helen
Taylor [–Jan 1907], was his constant companion after his wife's
death. Mill was an enthusiastic botanist all his life and a frequent
contributor of notes and short papers to The Phytologist.
During his last journey to Avignon he was looking forward to seeing
the spring flowers and completing a flora of the locality.
Mill did not relax his laborious habits or his ardent outlook on human
affairs. The essays in the fourth volume of his Dissertations (1875;
vol. 3 had appeared in 1867), on endowments, on land, on labor, and
on metaphysical and psychological questions, were written for The
Fortnightly Review at intervals after his short parliamentary
career. In 1867 he had been one of the founders, with Mrs. P.A. Taylor,
Emily Davies, and others, of the first women's suffrage society, which
developed into the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, and
in 1869 he published The Subjection of Women (written 1861),
the classical theoretical statement of the case for woman suffrage.
His last public activity was concerned with the starting of the Land
Tenure Reform Association, for which he wrote in The Examiner
and made a public speech a few months before his death; the interception
by the state of the unearned increment on land and the promotion of
cooperative agriculture were the most striking features in his program,
which he regarded as a timely compromise in view of the impending
struggle between capital and labor in Europe. He died in 1873, and
his Autobiography and Three Essays on Religion (1874)
were published posthumously. Mill
was a man of extreme simplicity in his mode of life. The influence
that his works exercised upon contemporary English thought can scarcely
be overestimated, nor can there be any doubt about the value of the
liberal and inquiring spirit with which he handled the great questions
of his time. Beyond that, however, there has been considerable difference
of opinion about the enduring merits of his philosophy. At first sight
he is the most lucid of philosophers. Many people have spoken of the
marvelous intelligibility of his writing. Usually,however, it is not
long before doubts begin to creep in. Although the lucidity remains,
its span is seen to be somewhat limited, and one sometimes has the
uneasy feeling that he is being equally lucid on both sides of a question.
Oddly enough, however, this judgment has
not led to any neglect of Mill. Little attention is now paid to Hamilton
or to Whewell, but Mill's name continually crops up in philosophical
discussions. This is partly due to the fact that Mill offers a body
of doctrine and a set of technical terms on many subjects (notably
on induction) that have proved extremely useful in the classroom.
But a more important reason is that he has come to be regarded as
a sort of personification of certain tendencies in philosophy that
it is regarded as continually necessary to expound or expose because
they make such a powerful appeal to serious minds.Thus he is or says
he is a Utilitarian; yet nothing, it is pointed out, could tell more
strongly against Utilitarianism than certain passages in his writings.
Then again, he is said to be an Empiricist (although he says himself
that he is not), and his theories of the syllogism and of mathematics
are constantly used to demonstrate the fatal consequences of this
way of thinking. It is misleading
to speak without qualification of Mill's Utilitarianism. Nor is it
sufficient to add that Mill modified the Utilitarianism that he inherited
from Bentham and from his father in one way and another in order to
meet the criticisms that it encountered in Victorian times. He does,
it is true, sometimes give that impression (as in his essay Utilitarianism);
but elsewhere (as in his essay On Liberty) he scarcely attempts
to conceal the fact that his premises are completely independent of
Bentham's. Thus, contrary to the common belief, it appears to be very
hazardous to characterize offhand the precise position of Mill on
any major philosophical topic. He sometimes behaved with a reckless
disregard of consequences more suitable to a Romantic than to a Utilitarian.
He is thoroughly romantic, again, and thoroughly representative of
his age in the eagerness with which he seeks out and endeavours to
assimilate every last exotic line of thought which shows any signs
of vitality. He himself claimed to be superior to most of his contemporaries
in “ability and willingness to learn from everybody,”
and indeed, for all his father's careful schooling, there was never
anybody less buttoned up against alien influences than Mill. In his
writings there can be discerned traces of every wind of doctrine of
the early 19th century.

1799
Honoré de Balzac, French novelist.^top^
Born in Tours, France, Balzac was educated in Paris, where he started
writing plays at the age of 20 while working as a lawyer's apprentice.
His plays bombed, and he took to writing thrillers under an assumed
name. Needing money, he launched disastrous ventures in printing and
silver mining and went bankrupt. While struggling under his debts,
he resumed writing, and by 1829 he was publishing under his own name,
convinced that he was a genius. By 1830, he had become a celebrated
writer who frequented literary salons. Balzac drove himself ruthlessly,
working 14 to 16 hours at a stretch, aided by some 50 cups of coffee
a day. He completed 90 novels, all part of a single series, La
Comédie Humaine, and died in Paris in on 18 August
1850 at age 51. He helped to establish the orthodox classical novel
and is generally considered to be one of the greatest fiction writers
of all time.
BALZAC ONLINE:

1766 Adam Wolfgang Töpffer, Geneva painter, caricaturist,
and engraver, who died on 10 August 1847. — more1726 Francis Cotes, English painter and pastelist who died
on 19 July 1770.  MORE
ON COTES AT ART 4 MAYwith
links to images.1726 Gabriel-François Doyen,
French painter who died on 13 March 1806.

^
1683 Elijah Fenton,
English poet who died on 16 July 1730.
Fenton is best known as a collaborator with Alexander Pope [21 May
1688 – 30 May 1744] and William
Broome [03 May 1689 – 16 Nov
1745] in a translation of The
Odyssey of Homer. After
graduating from Cambridge, Fenton became a teacher. He was promised
the patronage of Henry St. John (later 1st Viscount Bolingbroke) and
hence resigned the headship of Sevenoaks grammar school in Kent in
1710. His expectations, however, were not realized, and he was obliged
to earn his living as children's tutor to various noble families.
His Poems on Several Occasions (1717) was admired by Pope,
who asked Fenton if he would assist in a translation of The Odyssey.
Fenton translated books 1, 4, 19, and 20. He also wrote the Life
of John Milton (1725), edited the poems of Edmund Waller (1729),
and wrote Mariamne (1723), a tragedy. Pope composed his epitaph,
and Samuel Johnson was his early biographer.

Thoughts for the day:Where facts are few, experts are many.
Where facts are many, contradictions abound.
He reminds me of the man who murdered both his parents, and then, when sentence
was about to be pronounced pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan.
 Abraham Lincoln [12 Feb 1809 – 15 Apr 1865]